


how the ship of theseus sank

by iiejn



Category: Tennis no Oujisama | Prince of Tennis
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-21
Updated: 2010-08-21
Packaged: 2017-10-31 12:08:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/343877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iiejn/pseuds/iiejn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the switch was never meant to be a permanent device.</p>
            </blockquote>





	how the ship of theseus sank

Yagyuu stops playing tennis after his second year at high school. He does it for purely academic reasons – he figures that the university examinations process will be extremely rigorous, so what better time to start preparing than the present, and with his going to cram school nearly every day of the week, there is hardly any time left for him to devote to tennis. He plays his last practice match as a Rikkai regular right after the Nationals – which they won – performing the switch with Niou for one last laugh, naturally. Yukimura, who is already vice-captain of the team by then, expresses his regret that Yagyuu is leaving the team this early, to which Yagyuu replies, “If you’re really this keen on me playing again, I’ll keep my alternate weekends free.” He doesn’t.

The arrangement poses no problems except for one. Niou is no longer able to play tennis with the doubles partner that he is most accustomed to, and no matter who they pair him up with, the play he exhibits in those matches begins to have a strange, off-kilter quality to it, as if he isn’t already used to playing doubles, which becomes more apparent the more he flits from partner to partner. Eventually most of the team members start to complain that he’s too difficult to play with, and Yanagi suggests he becomes a singles player for most of the time. He is still an excellent player anyway, Yanagi says. In fact, more excellent a singles player than he has ever been before.

 

 

 

Niou and Yagyuu, who once were inseparable, start drifting apart after Yagyuu leaves the tennis team. It wasn’t really a matter of choice, more of inevitability – as team members they met each other nearly every day; they breathed, ate, slept tennis; and above all how often they performed the switch was directly proportional to how much time they time they spent playing tennis. At the peak of its frequency it was nearly impossible to tell between the two, and by that point in time the switch was common public knowledge, such that the concept had begun to segue into real life instead of being restricted purely to when they were playing tennis. You could never tell when Niou was – out of habit, of course – being Yagyuu and vice versa, and you could never tell when they were being themselves. People would catch Yagyuu cursing at something gone wrong, and afterwards he would apologise for the momentary lapse of self-control. Other times Niou could be observed being uncharacteristically polite and well-mannered, and his teachers would tell him how much better he looked with his shirt tucked in and his tie worn correctly.

And when Yagyuu stopped playing tennis it was only natural that increasingly, Niou would have looked into his mirror in the mornings and told himself, there’s no need for me to be Yagyuu anymore, and Yagyuu would do the same, telling himself, there’s no need for me to be Niou anymore. Suddenly the whole idea of the switch was moot and void, and that was when the two of them became the each of them, the separation process much like an amoeba undergoing binary fission, slow and organic, and they became two distinct individuals again.

But sometimes minor slip-ups still occur. Sometimes Yagyuu catches himself doing his homework with his left hand, and sometimes Niou adds cream and sugar to his coffee before remembering that he drinks his coffee black.

 

 

 

The two of them don’t even end up in the same class in their senior year. The opportunities for meeting are therefore slim, so it comes as a surprise when Niou corners Yagyuu after school one day, waiting outside his classroom and looking dangerously friendly.

“I need you to do the switch with me,” Niou says. “Just this one time.”

Yagyuu stares at him for a moment. It’s been a while since he’s had a conversation with Niou that lasted more than “Good morning”. “We don’t play tennis together anymore,” he says finally.

Niou leans against the wall, staring at Yagyuu, like a doctor would do before he gives a particularly troubling diagnosis to a patient. Finally he explains the situation. A girl is involved; her name is Michiko, and despite being a nine out of ten looks-wise – according to Niou, how awfully chauvinistic of him – the chemistry between them is about as much as that between a couple of pieces of inert metal sitting on a Petri dish in a laboratory freezer. Michiko is, apparently, “clingy”. Niou worries he might make her cry if he tries to initiate a break-up. He is, after all, not a particularly sensitive individual.

Jerk, Yagyuu thinks.

“So now I’m supposed to be a convenient tool for cleaning up the messes you make.”

“All that studying has to be getting to your head,” Niou says.

“You owe me a favour,” Yagyuu replies, after some consideration.

 

 

 

Yagyuu is, at first, apprehensive about attempting the switch again. On the evening of the day that Niou makes the proposition to him, he returns home to look for the necessary tools. The wig is still lying on the top shelf of his wardrobe, and the contact lenses are in the medical cabinet in his toilet. When he’s done with trying to look like Niou, he looks at his own reflection and thinks, it’s impossible. He’s been out of practice for too long. He rumples his shirt just a little bit more, takes a deep breath and tries to reorganise his thoughts. Somewhere in the back of his head, he is sure, there still remains a compartment that houses everything that he knows about Niou. The brain, his biology teacher used to say, organises one’s thoughts such that unneeded or unused pieces of information are compressed over long periods of time to facilitate the formation of new memories, and when one needs them again, these pieces of information unravel themselves one by one, slowly and gradually. Old habits die hard, after all.

By ten p.m. that night it is no longer Yagyuu but Niou who is standing in that room.

He calls Niou and declares, in Niou’s most annoying drawl, “I think we can give it a try tomorrow,” and is thrilled to hear himself – Yagyuu’s own sharp, crisp tone – say, “It’s a deal.”

 

 

 

The first few days are exhilarating, as if they were doing it for the first time all over again. Niou, Yagyuu thinks, really does have everything to lose doing this, watching him spew out model answers in World History on autopilot and attend all of Yagyuu’s council meetings in his stead. Perhaps he likes doing this. Yagyuu has to admit that it’s not probably not all that fun being him, and maybe, just maybe, the labour of having to live his rigid, structured life, for at least six or seven hours a day, is a right and just price for having him do something so awful to a complete stranger.

Yagyuu, on the other hand, thinks he could quite possibly be having the time of his life, barring the fact that he would never usually approve of a good majority of what Niou does from day to day. Most of the challenge of being Niou was left to when they were playing tennis, but being Niou off the courts was arguably rather enjoyable. Yagyuu tucks out his shirt, wears his tie askew, talks back to teachers, ignores his homework. Basically he tries as hard as he can to ruin Niou’s reputation even more than it already was. He thinks Niou doesn’t mind. In fact, Niou might even be relishing the experience, judging from all the times he’s had to talk to Yagyuu “as a representative of the disciplinary committee”.

Michiko really is stunningly pretty. She looks familiar, like a gravure idol staring out from between the pages of a weekly magazine, but that could probably be put down to the coiffured hair and egg-shaped face and doe eyes that they all have. When Yagyuu breaks the news to her as gently as he can, she starts tearing up anyway, and he gives her an awkward, somewhat brotherly pat on the shoulder before he leaves. It is the only time he’s been out of character in five days.

Afterwards he finds Niou at the window of the third-floor stairwell where he was watching everything.

“I think she really liked you,” Yagyuu begins, and Niou says, “And I really like you,” and Yagyuu can’t decide if he’s joking or not. He lets it pass.

 

 

 

When Niou next meets Michiko he is himself again; they bump into each other in the corridor between classes. She tears up at the sight of him, and further down the corridor she knocks into Yagyuu as she hurriedly tries to escape. Yagyuu, ever the perfect gentleman, asks her if everything is okay in such a kindly manner that no one could ever imagine that he was the very one who turned her down, and Niou, who watches him help her up, feels oddly pleased about it all.

 

 

 

Niou and Yagyuu, who once were inseparable but then drifted apart, become inseparable once again after that incident. Nobody knows this, of course, but Yagyuu suggests that they keep the switch going for a little while more, asking if Niou would mind. Of course Niou doesn’t mind. When Niou asks why, Yagyuu says, “For all purposes of your request we didn’t even need to have had such a long rehearsal.” He wants to conduct a trial.

They talk about tennis. They talk about Niou playing tennis, about how Niou plays only singles now, about how he has become so spectacularly good at singles tennis. Yagyuu does some research and turns up with the finding that he’s only second to Yukimura, and he mentions it to Niou, who shrugs and says that he “wouldn’t know”. He doesn’t know why either. He’s right; there’s an awful lot that Niou doesn’t know about himself and even more that Yagyuu doesn’t know about him. He’s beginning to think he’s starting to lose his grip on the role he’s playing from day to day, however temporarily. The genuineness of his portrayal bothers him more than it should. Problems like these never trouble Niou. He’s a natural.

Niou really is immensely popular with the girls. “Why don’t you shove off,” Yagyuu says to every single one of them who propositions him. At least, that’s what he thinks Niou would have said.

 

 

 

“Let’s try,” Niou says out of the blue one day, “a thought experiment. You do know that all the cells in your body replace themselves continuously twenty-four seven, right? So suppose that the rumour that it takes seven years for your entire body to regenerate itself – cell by cell – is true. Doesn’t that mean that you’re a different person every seven years?”

Yagyuu replies, almost instinctively, “That really depends on how you define ‘person’, doesn’t it? Physically speaking, of course, assuming that the seven-year rumour is true, of course you are a different person since each and every cell wasn’t the cell that it was seven years ago. This is only my theory, but the person is more than the sum of its parts; in other words, a person is a gestalt, a psychological and sociological concept that goes beyond the physical boundaries of elements and atoms and molecules. As long as you are conscious of the way you have always perceived things and how that perception has changed, and how other people have always perceived you, then evidently, your own person has always existed.” There is an unsaid implication, of course, because what immediately comes to Yagyuu’s mind is – having tried replacing so many facets of himself with Niou’s time and again, which parts of him are really Yagyuu and which parts are not? Is he a different Yagyuu every time they switch back, and how long will it take before the two of them can be considered to be the same homogeneous entity? Are they one person in two bodies? Four people in two bodies?

Occasionally Niou stays over at Yagyuu’s. He pretends they’re studying. For all practical purposes they do study. Yagyuu puts in two hours for every hour he is taught at school. Sometimes Niou returns at nine or ten after tennis, and Yagyuu’s mother always lets him in and gives him something to change into – Yagyuu’s clothes – and even warms up any leftovers they had at dinner. Niou can be disarmingly polite and charming when he wants to be. When it’s one a.m. and Yagyuu is still busy calculating the sixth root of some awfully inane and unnecessary equation Niou will find ways to distract him. Switch off the table lamp. Remove Yagyuu’s glasses, or confiscate his textbook. The boy needs his sleep.

“Don’t,” Yagyuu says. “Stop it.”

“Okay,” Niou replies.

 

 

 

The more Yagyuu thinks about it the more terrified he gets.

On several occasions he catches himself not thinking about Niou and how to behave like him, but of Niou and how he behaves. Clearly there is some overlap between the two, and the relationship between them is wholly circular. Yagyuu thinks he knows Niou inside out, but how true is that? He stares himself in the mirror once again and looks at that familiar face, that face which he should know inside out. This is when he’s angry, but never truly. This is when he’s irritable. This is the kind of expression he shows when he’s talking to somebody he trusts, somebody like Yagyuu. It’s a slightly modified version of his default. It’s got its guard down.

Yagyuu starts to fear for his own sanity. Halfway through his Mathematics assignment he realises he’s writing with his left hand again, and his handwriting leaves something to be desired. The state of his handwriting is a pressing concern, of course, but for the moment he can’t quite figure out who he is and what he’s doing, and he’s not even sure he can remember the exact mannerisms of Yagyuu Hiroshi, model pupil, filial son, Keio hopeful. That is something that deserves at least a marginal amount of fretting over, because right now he is not Yagyuu; he is not even Niou. He is somewhere in between, or maybe even somewhere far away from the loci where the two meet.

 

 

 

Absence makes the heart fonder, but familiarity breeds contempt. Humans are strange creatures, indeed. Yagyuu is no exception. So at the end of his little exercise he decides he shouldn’t have gone ahead with it in the first place; the switch should have ended when Niou’s request was fulfilled. Instead Yagyuu thinks he might have inadvertently caused his own downfall by wondering if he was playing Niou well enough, if he was playing the role to perfection. He couldn’t really help it; it had been so long.

And so when spending time with Niou became uncomfortable – spending time with Niou when the switch was in effect became exponentially more uncomfortable – Yagyuu decides he might actually be having an identity crisis. Identity crises, to be exact.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Niou asks one day, swinging an arm over Yagyuu’s shoulder. There’s a lot on Yagyuu’s mind, to be honest. He would never be able to cover all of it. For instance, Niou is sometimes too close for comfort, even when he’s not around; he’s always somewhere in the recesses of Yagyuu’s mind, like a tenet lodged into his subconscious. And then there are the times when the switch is taking place, and all Yagyuu can think of is that Niou should have been him, that Niou should have been born as Yagyuu Hiroshi instead, and he wonders if Niou thinks that when he look at Yagyuu, all of his deliberate slight in height and ungainly posture. Yagyuu is intelligent, but he knows he is capable of being confused sometimes.

“That you’re a narcissist,” Yagyuu tells Niou.

“So are you,” Niou says evenly. “You really do think a lot of yourself.”

They call it off a week later, because Niou owes Yagyuu a favour. 

 

 

 

Niou and Yagyuu, who once were inseparable, drifted apart after Yagyuu left the tennis team. They were never really that close afterwards, even though they remained friends, and there was always the odd study session; they would travel, joined at the hip on those afternoons, like Siamese twins. It was probably a sign of their – solidarity? – no one was really sure quite what to call it, but then the law of large numbers spoke at last and swallowed that strange period of oddity headfirst. That is, everything evens itself out, given enough time, and they were definitely given enough time. By the time high school ended they were certainly quite unfamiliar.

Like the victim subject to the conditioning of a Pavlovian experiment Niou picks up habits that he always finds difficult to quit. Initially, of course, everyone picks up a bad habit thinking it would be easy to get rid of – some people moreso than others. That is why Niou is an especially quick learner of habits, he is young and rash and arrogant, and if it is easy to pick up then it must be equally easily discarded. He is wrong on all counts, because in the end we are all human, and somewhere down the road the lines begin to blur and he can no longer remember which habits are his and his alone, and which are not.

“I keep forgetting,” he would say, stirring his ruined coffee in annoyance.

 

 

 

Yagyuu stops playing tennis after his second year at high school. He does it for purely academic reasons – and it works, because while he doesn’t end up valedictorian, at least he ends up in the college of his dreams with grades to spare. Somewhere along the line several scholarship offers and an internship make their appearance. In retrospect Yagyuu thinks he would have been able to manage his time effectively, tennis or no tennis, but it was good that he’d freed up all his time. It made things a lot easier.

At the college’s informal get-to-know sessions everyone shares his or her experiences from high school. Some people were born in France or Italy or Switzerland. Third-culture kids, if you will. Some admit that they’ve managed to get away with breaking school rules even though they ran the prefectorial board. With some encouragement Yagyuu coughs up the story of how he used to switch identities with his strange doubles partner while playing tennis, and that more or less contributed, in some way or another, towards several national tournament trophies.

“How strange?” they ask.

“Strange enough,” he always answers. Avoiding the point isn’t his specialty, but he thinks he is allowed to do it from time to time.

**Author's Note:**

> the title is a reference to the [problem of the ship of theseus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus).


End file.
